ON THE IDENTITY OF BLANCO's SPECIES OF BAMBUSA 
59 
lated collections were submitted to J. Sykes Gamble, Esq., for study. 
Mr. Gamble^ published a critical enumeration of the species recognizing 
seven genera and twenty-five species. In a supplementary paper^ 
he has added two genera and six species, making the total of known 
Philippine forms thirty-one, distributed in nine genera. Mr. Gamble, 
however, like other European botanists, had no detailed knowledge 
of the various forms as they occur in the field, and very wisely made 
no attempt to reduce Blanco's species; in fact he does not even 
enumerate them. Camus,® however, in his recent monograph of the 
group includes all of Gamble's species that were published before the 
year 1913, and at the same time includes all of Blanco's species, like 
Miquel, Steudel, and Munro, giving abbreviated descriptions from 
Blanco's data. Unlike Munro, however, he includes the species as 
valid ones, not as species of doubtful status. There is nothing to be 
gained in repeating these abbreviated descriptions of Blanco's species, 
for they are utterly inadequate as guides to the identification of the 
forms. Blanco's species should be either dropped entirely, or they 
should be interpreted with reference to all the data given by Blanco, 
growth form, habitat, distribution, time of flowering, uses, and native 
names. With a fair amount of field knowledge of the Philippines it is 
a comparatively easy matter for the local botanist to interpret most 
of Blanco's species, and to interpret them correctly. Without a 
knowledge of local conditions, the various types of vegetation, the 
native names and uses of plants, their relative abundance, distribution, 
time of flowering, etc., the task of correctly interpreting the species 
is a very difficult one. The case of the bamboos presents particular 
difficulties, as most species of bamboo rarely flower, and, without 
flowering specimens, attempts to classify the material meet with 
failure, especially as most of the Philippine bamboos are endemic. 
It is now possible correctly to interpret Blanco's species of bamboo, 
a task that would have been impossible before the Philippine collec- 
tions were critically studied with reference to the entire Indo-Malayan 
bamboo flora. As was to be expected, most of Blanco's species are 
found to be the common and widely distributed ones in central 
Luzon at low altitudes, and all of them have been described by other 
^The Bamboos of the Philippine Islands. Philippine Journ. Sci. C. Bot. 5: 
267-281. 1910. 
^ Some Additional Bamboos of the Philippine Islands, op. cit. 8: 203-206. 
1913. 
^ Les Bambusees 1-2 15. pi. i-ioo. 1913. 
